The Importance of Being Earnest

Effete and flighty ... Alex Felton as Algernon and Florence Hall as Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest, at the Library theatre, Manchester. Photograph: Gerry Murray

Just over 50 years ago, Oscar Wilde's comedy was the first play to be produced by the Library Theatre Company in the auditorium beneath the famous building in St Peter's Square. Now it provides the swan song for a theatre originally designed to host lectures rather than drama. It's a fitting farewell to this curious little stage, neither traditionally proscenium nor entirely thrust, that gave rise to a unique form of theatre-in-a-semi-circle.

Wilde's heroine, Gwendolen Fairfax, utters what might well be the author's artistic credo when she asserts: "In matters of utmost importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing." Chris Honer's production is very stylish indeed. A Beardsleyesque wooden screen echoes the graceful curve of the auditorium, while Algernon's taste in art (including a lasciviously homoerotic Caravaggio) seems to signify his tastes in general. Any doubt about the coded nature of his delight in "Bunburying" is dispelled when his butler slyly informs him that cucumbers are not to be found on the market "even for ready money".

Honer draws admirable performances across the board. The coy flirtation between Olwen May's Miss Prism and Malcolm James's Rev Chasuble is, for the first time in my experience of the play, actually quite funny. Simon Harrison makes a worthy Worthing, while Alex Felton's Algy is so effete his safety seems to depend on the adequate provision of silk chaises longues for him to flop upon. Florence Hall's flighty Cecily is a fine match for Natalie Grady's lustily determined Gwendolen, a formidable young woman clearly destined to become her mother – though she might need a sex change to achieve it, as "Lady Bracknell: Russell Dixon" is, intriguingly, not a misprint in the programme.

This is not the first time Lady Bracknell has appeared with a basso profundo voice and signs of five-o'clock shadow: Michael Fitzgerald played the part at Bristol Old Vic, while literary lampoonists Lip Service turned the piece into a cross-dressing free-for-all on this very stage. But Dixon, a fine comic artist enhanced with a bosom that makes him look like a tethered balloon, maintains a purse-lipped look of displeasure that is pure pantomime. Lady Bracknell proudly announces that by marrying a man of means she did not let penury stand in her way. Given such unstoppable social ambition, it was only a matter of time before she finally became a dame.